


We Who Are About To Die (But Not The Song, Coda #3)

by emilyray (emilyenrose), ignipes



Series: But Not The Song [4]
Category: Bandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-25
Updated: 2008-07-25
Packaged: 2017-10-16 02:09:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/167285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilyenrose/pseuds/emilyray, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Bob meets Frank Iero, Frank punches him in the face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Who Are About To Die (But Not The Song, Coda #3)

_  
**We Who Are About To Die (But Not The Song, Coda #3)**   
_   
[Story Index and Warnings](http://community.livejournal.com/shacklesnchains/446.html)

This one's for everyone who wondered, but especially [](http://arsenicjade.livejournal.com/profile)[**arsenicjade**](http://arsenicjade.livejournal.com/).

 ** _We Who Are About To Die_**  
_

The first time Bob meets Frank Iero, Frank punches him in the face.

It's pretty standard for the way his life is now. Years later, he won't even remember it.  
_

Bob's sold to the Triumph School eight months after the pirates. They strap him down to tattoo a horned skull on his forearm. It's really fucking ugly, Bob thinks, but they didn't need the straps. He wouldn't have bothered fighting. He's got the hang of this now; he knows when there's no point.

They dump him in the barracks - Triumph's a big school, fancy, it has an actual barracks for the winter months - and one of the gladiators lounging in the common room looks up. "Hey, it's a new boy," he comments.

"Hey, new boy," says one of the others. "You're on kitchen duty till we say otherwise."

There are guards stationed all around the room. Bob glances at them but they don't seem interested. This is normal, then.

"Okay. Anyone gonna show me the ropes?" he says.

The first gladiator blinks. "The ropes?"

"He means tell him what's what," says the other one. "Pretty simple, big guy. Cells thataway," he points with his thumb, "that's where we sleep. Practice ground thataway. They give us food but we have to cook it. Any messing around, you get cell time. Too much and all of us get cell time, so don't spoil it for the rest of us or we'll be really fucking pissed off."

"Okay," says Bob. "I'm Bob."

"You're New Boy," says the conversational gladiator. "Get used to it. Welcome to Triumph."

He turns away. No one else in the room is showing the slightest interest in Bob. They're not showing much interest in each other, either: the room's almost silent. Bob finds a patch of wall that no one else has claimed and drops to the floor, leaning against it. He closes his eyes. His forearm with the fresh ink on it really fucking hurts.

"All right, you little shit, welcome back to civilization," says someone loudly after a while. Bob jerks awake and looks up. "Hope you've learned your lesson." A guard is dragging another gladiator into the room from the direction of the cells.

The guy he's holding laughs breathlessly. "Oh yeah. Next time I'll punch _you_ out _first._ "

The guard rolls his eyes. "Motherfucker," he says, and shoves the guy forward. "Behave."

The guy stumbles forward a few steps. The first thing Bob notices about him is that he's really fucking _small_ , definitely the smallest guy in the room by a long way. Most gladiators are big guys anyway. (Bob remembers the pirates arguing about where to sell him, and one of them saying _are you kidding, we'll get way more from the schools for a guy with shoulders like that._ ) And Triumph specializes in heavy fighters most of the time. There are men in the room with fists the size of the guy's head.

The second thing he notices is how fast the guy moves, how quickly he gets his balance back, tossing his dark hair out of his face and smirking. And it's only after that that the third thing registers, maybe the most important thing: the guy's arms. Most of the men in the room are like Bob, with only two or three school tattoos marking them up, showing their history. This guy has at least a dozen, curling all the way up both his arms, disappearing under the short sleeves of his shirt. Bob's seen gladiators with that many before, but they were older, and usually on the fast track to an early death, sliding down the scale towards the most disreputable schools, the ones where the dying is the part people pay to see.

"Hi, boys," says the guy. "Miss me?"

No one answers at first.

"What, not even a little bit?" the guy says. A couple of the guards chuckle.

"Why don't you shut the fuck up, Frank?" says the gladiator who spoke to Bob earlier. It's not really a question. Frank just laughs.

Then his eyes fall on Bob. "Hey, who's this?" he says.

"New boy," says someone.

"Hey, new boy," says Frank. "You got a name?"

Bob shrugs. Frank narrows his eyes. "Haven't we met before?" he says. "I think we fought. At the Coronet tournament last year. Didn't we fight?"

Coronet was barely three weeks after the pirates. It's a blur. "I don't remember," says Bob.

"We fought," says Frank. "I don't forget faces. You did okay."

Bob shrugs again.

"Shut the fuck up, Frankie," says the talkative gladiator. "No one cares."  
_

They set off for the summer tour at the beginning of March. _Some summer_ , Bob thinks. It's still absolutely fucking freezing, the wind like ice. They'll be on the road right through to October, going from ring to ring and tournament to tournament, and then back in barracks for the winter.

"Okay, boys," says the trainer, slapping his coiled whip against his thigh the day they leave. "Pick your bunk buddies. Don't worry if you don't like him, maybe he'll die." There's a low rumble of laughter. It's amazing the things that can become funny after a while.

Bob doesn't know why they need bunk buddies, and he doesn't know anyone anyway. He just stands there while the other guys partner up, until eventually there's no one left but him and -

"Huh," says Frank. "Guess it's you and me, new boy." He laughs. "And here I was hoping I'd get a room to myself again."

"Tough luck, Frankie," says the trainer, grinning.

Bob just shrugs.  
_

The evening after the first ring they actually get put up in a fucking hotel.

Sure, there are guards on every floor and every door is locked from the outside, but there are still _beds_. Frank laughs when he sees them. "It's good to be Triumph," he says. "Pick one, new boy."

Bob sits down on the bed nearest the window.

"Good stuff," says Frank. "I like to be by the door anyhow." He flings himself down on the other bed, bounces a couple of times. " _Mattress,_ " he says. "It's funny the things you miss. How was your day? Did they send you out? I didn't see you."

"No," says Bob, and then, grudgingly, "You?"

"Three rounds against Tank," says Frank. "Tank'n'Frank. Not too bad."

Bob blinks, and then turns around to stare at him. Frank's on his back on the bed, arms crossed behind his head. He looks comfortable. There are bruises on his knuckles and he's going to have a black eye soon, but he looks fine.

Tank's a heavyweight, a fucking giant of a guy - Bob doesn't even know his real name, but he's called Tank for a reason. He's got to be three times Frank's size. And Bob was there when he got carried in earlier, head lolling to the side.

" _You_ fucked up Tank like that?" he says incredulously.

Frank glances at him, and says, "It wasn't as bad as it looked. I knocked him out and bloodied his nose."

"How the hell did you knock him out?" says Bob.

"He's pretty slow," says Frank. And then he adds, "It was just a show fight. We weren't really trying for damage."

Bob stares at him.

Frank laughs a weird, awkward laugh and says, "You know Triumph only buys the best, right?"

Bob says, "Sorry."

"God," says Frank, "you really are pretty new, aren't you?"

Bob hesitates. Then he says, "Ten months."

The room goes quiet.

Eventually Frank says, "You never did tell me your name."

"Bob," says Bob. "Bob Bryar."

"Frank Iero," answers Frank. Gladiators aren't like most slaves. Nearly all of them are freeborn, convicts or prisoners of war or debtors’ kids trained when they're young. Nearly all of them have surnames. Bob even knows a few, now. "How'd you end up here, Bob Bryar?" Frank asks.

Bob pauses for a moment, picking through his head for words. Then he says, "When I - when I was a kid. I wanted to see the world. So I went to sea."

"Sailor boy, huh?" says Frank.

"Yeah," says Bob. "For four, five years. My ship got attacked by pirates last summer."

"Fuck," says Frank quietly.

"Yeah," says Bob.

"Do you miss it?" Then Frank shakes his head. "Stupid question. I mean -"

"I was never one of those guys who gets sentimental about the sea," Bob says. "It's a big fucking puddle, so what. But." He looks up at the wooden ceiling of the hotel room. It slopes on one side - they're right under the roof. It makes the room a lot smaller. "It's been a while since I heard the gulls," he says.

"Fuck," says Frank again.

"What about you?" says Bob. "How did you get -" _like this?_

There's a rustle from the other bed. When Bob glances over, Frank's turned to lie flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as well. "I was convicted of murder," he says.

"You killed someone?"

There's a long pause.

"I'm a fucking gladiator," says Frank. "I've killed a lot of people."

He doesn't look at Bob before he rolls over and goes to sleep.  
_

"Hey," says Bob to one of the gladiators in the morning. "Hey. Do you know about Frank?"

The gladiator looks up from the food he's been concentrating on, annoyed at the interruption. "What about Frank?" he says.

"Do you -" says Bob, and then, "Did he really kill someone?"

"You heard that?" the man says, and snorts. "Took you long enough."

"Did he?" says Bob.

" _Someone_ , right. Everyone knows this. Two people." The man spits on the ground. "Two _kids_. He's in the rings for life."

Bob feels his eyes widen. _Two kids_. He sees again in his mind's eye Frank lounging on the bed. _I was convicted of murder._

"Iero's a demon," says the man. "You'll find out. Poor fucking Tank, he's scared as shit of him, and the trainers pair them up all the time cause the crowds like to see the big guy and the little guy face off." He shakes his head. "He fucking _laughs_ all the time when he's out there, who does that? Bad luck, getting stuck with him for the tour. You took a bullet for the rest of us there."  
_

"Hey," whispers Frank in the cell they're put in that night. "Hey, Bob."

Bob rolls over, keeps his back to him, doesn't answer. _Two kids._

"Hey," Frank tries again.

Bob still doesn't say anything. He's aware of Frank sitting up on the other side of the cell, staring at his back. He hopes Frank feels the disgust coming off him.  
_

Before and after the big fights in the city rings, the gladiators are locked into cages open on all four sides and left there for the public to come take a look at them. Before the fights, there are men yelling and joking, and bookies. After the bookies have gone and the crowds are smaller, people come to gawk at the winners and whisper about the cages now left empty. Bob sits down in a corner of the cage he's been shoved in with Frank - it's always two to a cage - while Frank paces like a wild animal in a menagerie, up to the bars and away again, sometimes stopping when one of the bolder observers tries to talk to him. He doesn't go near Bob, so Bob doesn't pay much attention.

"Hey! Hey, Frankie, remember me? I came to see you fight last year!"

Frank stops. There's a guy standing by the bars, a skinny young man wearing a brown jacket. He's got a girl with him, blonde and pretty, clinging nervously to his arm and watching the cages with big eyes. "We came to thank you! I told Cherry here to put her money on you. I said you'd win, I said you were the best. She didn't believe me!" He grins at the girl. "Can't judge by appearances, right?"

"Are you sure it's safe to talk to them?" says the girl.

"Oh, it's fine. Come be friendly. Frankie, you're our favorite!"

Frank turns around and looks at them. "Sure, I remember you," he says easily, wrapping a hand around the cage bars as he speaks and smiling. Frank always smiles when there are free people around. "Got yourself a girlfriend now?"

"This is Cherry," says the man proudly. "She's my fiancée."

Frank looks her up and down. "You're too good for him, beautiful," he says with a grin. "Run away with me."

The girl giggles. "Oh, he's charming!" she says. "Some of them are so _surly_ , it's a bit scary." She glances sideways at Bob as she says it. Bob tucks his head down and doesn't react.

"Don't mind sailor boy, he's just a little shy," says Frank. "Stick with me, I'm charming as fuck." He smirks at her through the cage bars. The girl laughs. Her fiancé says, "See, I told you you'd like him."

"I'd never seen a gladiator show before. You were so brave!" says the girl. "Doesn't it get scary fighting the big ones?"

"Nah," says Frank. "Gotta stand up to the bullies, right?" He winks. Bob looks away. Tank's the opposite of a bully, too slow-witted and sweet-natured for it. He's been looking steadily more and more battered through the summer, and Bob knows a lot of the guys have started pulling their punches when they're paired up against him. He doesn't know if Frank does that. He hasn't asked.

"Do you want - are we allowed to give them things?" the girl asks. "I've got all this chocolate left over. You like chocolate, right?" she says to Frank.

"I'd like anything you gave me, beautiful," says Frank.

"You can give him stuff if you want," says the man. "Just throw it through the bars, don't get close enough to touch him. That's dangerous."

The girl giggles and digs out a half-finished bar of chocolate from her purse, wrapped in tissue paper. She tosses it into the cage and giggles harder. Frank stoops to pick it up and blows her a kiss. "Stop trying to steal my girl, Frankie!" says the man. "We'd better go. I'll catch you next time Triumph comes through, okay?"

"Sure," says Frank. "Thanks for the chocolate, beautiful."

When they're gone Frank steps away from the bars. After a moment he says, "Want some, sailor boy? I can't stand this sugary shit."

Bob doesn't say anything.

He feels something knock against his foot a few seconds later, and when he looks up the chocolate bar is lying there. Frank's looking the other way.

He picks it up. Later that night, when they're back in cells to sleep, he eats it slowly, licking the smears of chocolate off his fingers afterwards, and thinks about traveling south, about foods he's tasted in ports he visited halfway across the world.  
_

Tank dies after Coronet.

The thing about tournaments, Bob thinks, the fucking thing is, that they pit different schools against each other. The guys from the other schools didn't know to be careful, didn't know how slow Tank's reactions have gotten over the last few months. Most of them probably wouldn't have cared if they did know. You look out for yourself first, and then your own side. That's how it works.

There's a makeshift barracks at the Coronet ring, and Triumph have a common room. The gladiators - the _surviving_ gladiators, Tank's not the first to die this summer - are hanging around in silence, the way they always do. The guards around the room are equally quiet, which is more unusual, but not much.

The tournament's over. Triumph came second. Bob fought in three rounds, got taken down in the third but not badly hurt. He's been really fucking lucky this year. The worst injury he's had to deal with was a sprained wrist.

Now they're waiting.

Eventually the trainer walks into the room and holds up a hand. He waits until everyone's looking at him and then he shakes his head.

Bob looks at the floor. He _liked_ Tank.

"Mother _fuck_ ," says Frank suddenly, too loudly, and when Bob looks up he's already in motion, whirling across the room to a guard who's not ready, who's taken by surprise. Frank knees him hard in the groin and slams his fist into his nose at the same time. The guard screams and folds up as Frank snatches for his gun -

And then the trainer yells, "Freeze or they fire!"

Frank goes still. Every other guard in the room has his gun pointed at him.

"Now, Frankie," says the trainer kindly after a moment. "What was the point of that?" He sighs. "Come on, cells, all of you. You all need to calm down."

"Fuck you, Frank," mutters someone. Bob sort of agrees. They could have had the rest of the evening in the common room, and the cells at Coronet are all underground, tiny and dark.

When they've all been herded in, two to a cell like always, the trainer pauses in front of Bob and Frank. "Why you gotta do this to me, Frankie?" he says.

Frank shrugs. "Can't blame a man for trying, right?"

The trainer sighs. "I don't know how to punish you. You keep this shit up, you're gonna get sold again. You want another tattoo that bad?"

Frank folds his arms and doesn't say anything. After a moment the trainer shakes his head and leaves.

"You don't know how to punish me?" explodes Frank to the air the moment the door's closed. "Wow, I don't know, that's a difficult one. You could beat me, I guess, but it's not like that even bothers me anymore, so - oh, I know! You could cover my fucking _skin_ with your fucking _marks_ and then drag me from place to place and lock me in a different cage every night and send me out into the fucking ring every fucking day to fight maybe to the death, and oh, hey, make me fight a guy who's getting a little closer to dying every time he gets shoved out onto the sand, I'd feel awesome about that, you can bet I'd be pretty fucking _punished_ like that - but oh _wait_ , you do it _anyway_ , so maybe that won't work either -"

"Go to sleep, Frankie," says someone in one of the other cages.

Frank spins round, snarling. " _Don't tell me what to do_ , fucker."

"Whatever," says the gladiator in the dark. "At least I'm not a fucking childkiller."

Frank's breath hisses out between his teeth, but he goes quiet.  
_

Bob goes and finds Tank's cellmate in the morning.

"Hey," he says. "Okay if I ask them to put me in with you? I can't handle Iero anymore."

"Sure," says the guy heavily. "Sure. Could use the company."  
_

Frank gets sold at the end of that summer, and no one's very sorry to see him go. Bob's with Triumph for another year, and then suddenly the school's aristocratic owner loses interest, the money dries up, and they're all being sold off. Bob's not one of Triumph's stars and there's no other school that rushes to snap him up: he spends six months with Steel Bell, and then gets traded for a guy from the Spiders. That lasts until the Spiders go bust too. Lots of schools are falling apart lately, lots of nobles suddenly unable to afford their toy soldiers.

Bob ends up getting sold to a caravan that's headed for the Coronet market. No one buys him there, and then the remnants of that caravan join up with another one, a gang of unscrupulous slavers taking fifty-odd half-trained kids cross-country to the city for the school sales just before the end of the fighting season.

He's seen Frank a few times in all that time, even fought him once or twice - never one on one, but in the big melee fights that get staged sometimes. Frank's a star of the circuit, had a reputation before Bob was even captured. He draws in the crowds in their hundreds - even thousands, in town - to watch him go crazy on the sand. Some of them know the story, as well, _he killed two kids_ , and it adds a dangerous edge to the spectators' fascination. Every time Bob sees him he seems to have acquired more ink. He guesses Frank's as much trouble everywhere as he was at Triumph.

Every time Frank sees Bob, he nods at him. If he's close enough he'll murmur, "Good to see you, sailor boy," before they start beating the shit out of each other. Bob never says anything back. He's sort of surprised Frank remembers that conversation. He doesn't feel much like a sailor boy anymore. It's been a long fucking time since he's seen the sea.

He's maybe more surprised than he should be when two guys come down to the caravan dragging Frank between them after the Coronet tournament is over. One of them says, "The little fucker's yours for a penny. We said we'd hang onto him till after Coronet and that's _it._ "

Frank's unconscious - drugged, probably. The slavers seem pretty pleased to get their hands on him, probably thinking of the profit they'll be able to make out of a well-known fighter like this one. Bob suspects they'll change their tune once he wakes up and they actually have to deal with him.  
_

The day before the caravan's due to leave, one of the slavers says, "You know what would save some time? If we made the kids fight now, weeded out the duds."

"Good idea," says another one. "Is there a ring free?"

"We should just shove'em all in there," says a third. "See what Frankie does when he's got a whole _army_ of kids to kill."

They all laugh. The first guy says, "Not a bad idea. We could make the big ones fight too, charge people to watch. There's still loads of tourists hanging around."

"Just make it a fucking melee!"

All the slavers seem to approve of that idea. To Bob's surprise, there's a low curl of fury starting in his chest. He hadn't thought he had any anger left, after all this time.

They send the kids out to fight first, holding the adult fighters - there are twelve, fifteen of them, maybe, Bob doesn't know - at the edge of the ring. He tries not to watch too closely once it starts. This is - he was an adult when he was taken, he's never seen anything like this, never been part of a school that trained them up from small, and this, this is the worst fucking thing he's ever seen. The youngest ones out there are maybe eleven.

After a while one of the slavers says, "This is kind of boring."

"Send out some of the big guys?" says another.

 _Not me,_ thinks Bob. _I can't do it. I won't do it. Not me._

"You, and you, and you!" yells the slaver, pointing at three of the guys. Not Bob. _Thank god, I can't_. The slaver pauses, grinning. "And Frankie, of course. Let's have a little bit of excitement. There are forty of them and only four of you, boys, that's ten each!"

Bob screws his eyes shut and thinks _if I can just get away from the guy standing behind me_ \- but the guy standing behind him has a gun, there's no way, no way.

He snaps his eyes open when he hears the howl, low animal rage, raw _fury_. It echoes so exactly what's going on inside him that he half-thinks he made it himself - but he didn't. It's Frank, out in the ring, Frank, out on the sand, Frank yelling, "Pick on someone your own size, motherfucker!" at the back of one of the other guys the slavers sent out and launching himself at him.

It's almost funny, Bob thinks, because the kid who's fallen to the ground between them is maybe fifteen, and he's probably taller than Frank is.  
_

Afterwards they shove the gladiators and kids into holding cells, row upon row in a dark warehouse that probably used to be used for something else. It has windows set high in the walls, and the bars across them don't stop the bright moonlight from streaming in.

Bob leans back against the cold slimy stone and closes his eyes.

Behind his eyelids he sees the image of Frank in the ring, standing over the fallen kid and baring his teeth at all comers, a light in his eyes like the vengeance of the gods.

He opens his eyes again and glances at Frank in the next cage, huddled on the pallet, a thick bandage around his wrist. It got injured somewhere in the melee, or maybe afterwards when the slavers' guards waded into things trying to get him under control. He hears again Frank's voice that night two years ago when they shared a room for the first time. _I was convicted of murder_. And it's like something drops into place in his head, like the wind suddenly snapping in the sails and making them billow and go taut as the ship darts forward.

 _I was convicted of murder._

Which is not the same thing as -

"Hey," he says softly. "Hey, Iero. Frank."

Frank's face twists into a snarl. He saves his laughter and his defiance for when there's an audience.

" _What_?" he says.

"You didn't do it," says Bob. "Did you."

Everything's still for a moment. Then Frank raises his head slowly and turns to look straight at Bob.

He doesn't say anything. His eyes gleam in the moonlight as the corners of his mouth turn up.


End file.
